Author: Clinton

The 2016 Asus ZenFone 3 Max is getting a nice surprise for owners starting today.  The company has pushed out the Android Oreo 8.1 update to the phone along with the new ZenUI 5.0 update to the phone.  The updated firmware is version 15.0200.1807.406 for those keeping score at home.

The update can be checked for on our ZenFone 3 Max by going to Settings>About>System Update.  Given that it has just been released, it make take a few days to get to everyone so patience is the key.

In Chrome OS and Chrome for desktop (Chrome for MacOS, Chrome for Windows, and Chrome for Linux), if you long press the back arrow while you are on a browser page, you will get your recent browsing history for that tab.  It is a handy feature.  On Android however, when you long press the back button on your phone while in Chrome you get… nothing.  You can press the button as long as you want but it will just take you back to your previous page.

That looks to be changing in Chrome 70.

A new flag has popped up in the Chrome for Android Canary app, which is based on Chrome 70, that allows you to enable the back button on your phone to display you recent tab history.

After a bit of teasing and a roll out to the web, the YouTube for Android app is finally starting to get a Dark Mode.  The update is a cloud-side update which means as long as you have the latest version of the Android app on your phone, you will have the update pushed to you behind the scenes and not have to update your app.  For those that are curious, the latest build is version 13.28.54.

The YouTube team at Google appears to be slow rolling this update out so not everyone is seeing it just yet, me included.  This isn’t uncommon for these cloud-side pushes so if you aren’t seeing it yet, chances are good you will see it today or tomorrow.  You’ll know you got the update when you see a pop up in the YouTube for Android app letting you know it is available.

The Google Photos site is now starting to show an option to allow you to merge faces in your library.  Photos since the beginning has had facial recognition built into it and has done a reasonable job of helping you identify people in your albums and tagging them.  The challenge with it has come with age progression of children and photos of peoples at odd angles.  It seems that the Photos team have be doing a bit of work on the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms on the feature.

On the Google Photos site, if you go to the Albums tab and click on People & Pets album, you will see a banner at the top of the page with suggestions of faces to merge under the tag for that person or pet.

Google has dropped the hammer on a wide range of apps in the Google Play Store, including those that mine cryptocurrency, contain hate speech, and those that contain adult content aimed at minors.  The changes are part of Google efforts to clean up the Play Store and make it a safer place.

Developers who have apps in the Play Store with the restricted content will have their apps immediately removed and, in some case, could have their apps reported to law enforcement officials.  In almost all cases, not only will the app be removed but the developers account will be removed from Google all together.

Microsoft has rolled out a new update to the OneDrive for Android app, bringing with it fingerprint authentication support.  The new update is version 5.14 for those keeping score at home and has been released to the Google Play Store.

When you update to this new version, under the app settings, you will have the option to enable a PIN code as you have been able to do for some time in OneDrive.  Once you enter that PIN, you will be prompted for your fingerprint.  You can either tap your fingerprint sensor or skip this if you want to continue to use your PIN to log in and not your fingerprint.